The current work of Peter Reading - a mixture of fragmentary, lyrical translations from Greek, Latin, Chinese and Anglo-Saxon, historical pastiche and fierce original satire - resembles no one so much as the early Ezra Pound. Barricaded behind the classics, both "sing Goddam" at their society and its literature. But the quality of the work that they both produce from this polemic position is erratic, as in this poem from Faunal:

Enacting in miniature Reading's central drama (the poet giving up), "Everglades" has, like many of his poems, the merit of being short. This is not flippant praise: Reading sees with Pound that "to bore people... is one most flagrant crime". And if you are going to put a reductionist view of life, the form should at least fit the philosophy.

The above, though, is too pat, too studiedly boorish. Reading's model is the tanka, a Japanese form that adds two seven-syllable lines to the better-known haiku. He contrives to make it appear a traditional nature haiku undercut by editorial dismissal. But the nature poem here is inadequate, and so is the brusque commentary.

If it were all like this, Reading's art - pursued with unabashed busyness since 1996's misleading Last Poems - might indeed seem futile, a collection of reactionary one-note squibs, recalling Roland Barthes's des-cription of "those productions of contemporary art which exhaust their necessity as soon as they have been seen (since to see them is immediately to understand to what destructive purpose they are exhibited: they no longer contain any contemplative or delectative duration)".

Such squibs, though, have to be read alongside the more nuanced pieces in his artfully sequenced collections. In Faunal , these are subtler takes on the nature poem. "That Nine-banded Armadillo" catches its prey "scruttering into the brush", an act requiring "no fancy moral / or intellectual envoi". This 6-liner again rejects a modern tradition (elaborate, anthropomorphic animal description), but not without some delectable precision ("scruttering") of its own.

Reading's armadillo is related to Pound's vanishing field mouse in the poem "And the days are not full enough": a symbol of life slipping by, and a simultaneous victory for life's particularity and variety, which distracts the poet from his abstract lament.

There are no fancy envois in Reading: he is admirably uninterested in either hiding or elaborating his point. As TS Eliot said of Pound's early poetry, it is "always definite and concrete because he has always a definite emotion behind it".

The definite emotion in Faunal is the prospect of extinction, avian and human. Reading often likes to expose the essential meaninglessness of versification. But it is the persistent pulse of metre which, in return, introduces living ironies into his bleakest exclamations. Here, in irregular hexameters, the instinctive rhythm of the call of some whooping cranes is juxtaposed poignantly with the man's rhetorical cry: "When they took flight, the trumpets sounded over the marshes, / kerloo kerleeloo, kerloo kerleeloo, kerloo kerleeloo, / and we knew, we knew we would die without seeing the species again."

The whooping cranes are in Texas, and Faunal ranges internationally for its subjects. Like previous books, its deeper structure is a mental journey fragmenting as it approaches a final destination; usually death, but in this book, more tenderly, Odysseus' Penelope. The last sequence, "Laertidean", pastes pithy scraps of Homer beside personal odysseys:

By Amtrak out of Austin to Alpine, couple of iced Buds in the rattling bar followed by T-bone and Fort Stockton red. And through the dust-grained window of the Club Car, pink Scissor-tails migrating with the fall and vultures southbound for the borderline and dried-up gulches, and the tender said: 'I bin this rowt, now, twenny years an all; nothing much happens in th desert har, save for th casional flowrin prickly par and flash-floods thro th dra creek over thar - I guess ya could say...' buthe never finished. The arid basin, with our speed, diminished; the glass revealed a season in decline.

This is Reading writing at his best: factual, formally adept, his diction precise and percussive, sketching the scene cleanly and without obtrusive personality. The tender is not a grotesque, as Reading's sillier exercises in colloquial character can be. The vignette is moving, and the moral unfancy: a man has migrated in modern luxury between one waste land (the desert) and another (Alpine in autumn).

Reading's prickly pears are not TS Eliot's symbolic totem poles, danced around by hollow men in need of salvation. His pessimistically humanist, anti-Romantic, anti-transcendent attitude is all but absolute. Nevertheless, the cliché that anti-Romantics are Romantic at heart is almost conceded by Faunal 's envoi, "Afflatious", which recalls various memorable sightings, concluding:

And I'd say (if I entertained such mawkish conceits) that on each of these afflatious encounters my soul ascended like that Skylark I watched as I lay and dreamed through a summer morning in a sweet pasture in Shropshire on an upland when I was younger.

"Bird thou never wert": after describing birdlife with the clinical specificity of a guidebook, Reading slyly invokes Shelley's ethereal Skylark. It is his saving grace as a poet that he is ultimately able to defy everyone, including himself.

· Jeremy Noel-Tod is was formerly assistant editor of Arete, the arts tri-quarterly